In a high availability (HA) cluster of virtual machine hosts, if a host in the cluster is believed to have crashed, the virtual machines running on the crashed host are restarted on another host in the cluster. However, restarting a virtual machine on another host does not maintain a state of the virtual machine. For example, a memory state of the virtual machine typically resides on local virtual machine disk memory associated with the original host, which is inaccessible by any new host on which the virtual machine is restarted. Moreover, the restart of a virtual machine on a new host frequently requires significant time to recover the guest operating system and application after reboot. Thus, the restart process is frequently a time consuming and inefficient process.